Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I listened to the previous speaker, the member for Ballarat, with a good deal of interest because, as she spoke, anyone who was listening and did not have a knowledge of the background of this bill, the Social Security and Veterans’ Affairs Legislation Amendment (Enhanced Allowances) Bill 2008, would have thought that it contained original thought—that the Labor Party had managed to have an original thought that it put forward as policy as we went forward to the last election. But, to those people who are aware, this was one of those policies known as Labor’s ‘me too’ policy. It was a policy announced by the then coalition government on 23 October 2007 entitled ‘More Support for Pensioners, Self-Funded Retirees, People with Disabilities and their Carers’, only to be followed on 1 November 2007 by the Labor Party’s release of their policy called ‘Making Ends Meet: Federal Labor’s Plan for Older Australians, People with Disabilities and Carers’. So the bill has its origin in coalition policy. Indeed, it has antecedents. The policy was first developed for the 2006-07 budget when the coalition provided a bonus payment equal to the annual amount of utilities allowance for each person of age pension age eligible for that allowance. It was extended to other groups of older Australians who were recipients of the mature age allowance, partner allowance and widow allowance, and they also received the bonus. In the budget for 2007-08, the coalition provided a one-off pension seniors bonus payment of $500 to everyone of age or service pension eligibility for the utilities allowance or the seniors concession allowance. That was finally developed into the policy of 23 October 2007 which I mentioned previously and which is the antecedent of the legislation that is now before us. In other words, the very simple proposition I am putting is that, if the opposition—or, rather, the opposition as we now are—had not put forward this proposition when it was in government, this legislation would not be before the House because it was, as I said before, one of the ‘me too’ policies which Labor adopted.

In proposing this utilities payment, it should be acknowledged that the coalition developed this policy within the framework of recognising the worth of individuals, not the collective that the government will continue to apply. We recognised that individuals needed assistance with their utilities payments as they came around, just as we had recognised this in our very much earlier policy when we said the CPI was not a sufficient index for the age pension and, indeed, for service pensions because veterans’ entitlements to these utilities and concession allowances are a fundamental focus of our policy and the ‘me too’ bill that we see. The policy that we introduced to change the indexing of age pension and service pensions from CPI to MTAWE—male total average weekly earnings—was simply to recognise that older Australians who had given enormous service and sacrifice in bringing up families and contributing to the wealth of the nation were not being properly rewarded for what they had done by the utilisation of the CPI, which of course had been Labor policy for 13 years prior to that. So we made that promise and, on coming into government in 1996, we in fact honoured that promise. And MTAWE became the index that increases were measured by. When we came into office and we started to see the growth of wages again—which of course they had not done under Hawke and Keating when the policies that they had introduced suppressed wages—we saw a need to ensure that pensioners were not left behind. It was this concern for the individual person who had made a contribution, not the collective—that group over there, and the individual can be sacrificed to the group—which prompted that change in policy.

The bill that is before us enables an increased utilities allowance of $500 to be paid to people receiving the age pension, mature age allowance, partner allowance, widow allowance, service pension, veterans income support supplement, carer payment, disability support pension and DVA invalidity service pension; to holders of the Commonwealth seniors health card; and to pensioners, carers and people with disabilities. These people will receive $500 per person or couple. It will also be paid to self-funded retirees, who are eligible for $500 each. This legislation was born of the concern and recognition that a great number of people had a need for this increase.

It is very important that our policy, which this bill reflects, was to increase the utilities allowance payment and extend it to disability pensioners, particularly, who had created quite a voice for themselves so that they would be heard. The then government, the now opposition, recognised that voice and the fairness of what they had to say and extended this to them. As I said previously, the then opposition and now government ‘me too’d’ that policy.

I was also pleased to see that this bill fulfils the Labor Party policy to increase the telephone allowance for older Australians, carers and people with disabilities from $88 to $132, provided they are eligible to receive income support and have an internet connection at home. This also applies to veterans and their dependants, provided they too have an internet connection at home. This is recognition of the fact that the fastest growing group of people in the community who are taking up use of the internet is the over-55s group. Very early in the piece, when I first took over as Minister for Aged Care back in 1998, the over-55s made very low use of the internet and now, as I said, they have become the fastest growing users of the internet within our community. So it is pleasing to see that that has been delivered upon.

The third thing that Labor promised was, again, a take-up of an earlier coalition policy, which was to negotiate with the states to have the states give reciprocity for travel concession. This is one of the real contentious issues that older Australians have had for many years. In 2001 we, as the then government, made a commitment to undertake to negotiate with the state governments to see that recognition take place. The Labor Party has said that, because all governments in Australia are now Labor, it will be able to negotiate an outcome which other people could not negotiate. It is true to say that the state governments would not sign on to the agreement—for whatever reason they had, they refused to sign on. Although the money was put forward by the federal government to compensate the state governments for the cost that they would have, it did not happen.

In the papers that it put forward to be costed prior to the election, the Labor Party put forward $50 million to compensate state governments over four years for the cost of negotiating these reciprocity arrangements. There is not one word about that in this bill—not a syllable. It was with great fanfare that the Prime Minister, as he now is, announced the policy back then on 1 November 2007. He even put his picture on the press release, ‘Making ends meet—national travel concessions for older Australians’, in which he said:

For example, a bus driver in New South Wales will be able to apply the standard concession when an older Australian presents a valid State Government Seniors Card even if it is from another State or Territory.

This will include long distance rail travel on routes like the Indian Pacific, the Ghan and the Overland.

Reciprocal transport concessions will help older Australians who like to travel to visit their grandchildren and see the country.

Federal Labor will end the buck-passing between the States and the Commonwealth.

He also said:

That’s because all governments in the country are now Labor and they will be easily able to discuss these things and implement them because they are all Labor.

And yet we get this bill before the House today, brought in early—and I commend that because it is important that the utilities allowance and concession payments be made, even though the indexation date has been postponed by the legislation from 20 March to 20 September. It shows that there is no movement at all on this important issue of the transport concessional card. I repeat that a big fanfare was made by the government saying that they would be able to achieve outcomes because they could all talk with one voice. And yet there is not a word; there is nothing in this bill about it and nothing to explain why it is not being dealt with. It is simply a bill to bring in what is basically legislation to enact a previous government’s commitment, the now opposition’s policy.

I listened with interest to the debates in the House today, particularly during the MPI, about the way in which the government are going to deliver on other promises. The first one they made was that they would bring down interest rates. Since they have been in government, interest rates have gone up. They said they would bring down grocery prices. They have appointed a commissioner to oversight them. They said they would bring down petrol prices. Petrol prices have gone up, as indeed have grocery prices. So the three big issues for which they made promises—reduce interest rates, reduce grocery prices and reduce petrol prices—have failed, failed and failed. What is their policy to deal with this inflationary pressure, the effects of which these utility allowances are meant to meet some of the payments for? It is very simply this: they are restoring all the power of the trade union movement that had diminished in the last 11½ years—restoring that power to the unions so they will again become a monopoly player. The impact of that is to be inflationary. There is only one tool that the government has to use, and that is trying to force people out of jobs to increase the size of the unemployment pool so that pressure can be taken off inflation.

The government can use all the weasel words that they want, but at the end of the day what Treasurer Swan is saying to the Australian people is, ‘You can’t have the full employment that the coalition government gave you and have low inflation.’ Well we did it. We said: ‘When the economy is booming and when there are surpluses and we’ve gathered in too much money’—we do not need that amount of money to deliver the things that are needed for people—‘we will give it back to you, the people. We will give you back your money.’ So people felt that when prices were rising and they got a tax cut, they had some more money in their pockets. This brought back the pressure to stop pushing for higher wages, which in turn brought back the pressure to start pushing higher prices to pay for the higher wages. In addition to that, it stopped the money remaining in government hands. Governments, no matter of which persuasion, like to spend the money they have in their hands. So, if we had not had that tax cut policy, we would have had the triple whammy: we would have had a government with the money still to spend, we would have had people pushing for an increase in wages and we would have had employers pushing for an increase in prices to pay for the increased wages. We would have gone up exactly the same way and down the other side, as we did under Paul Keating with the ‘recession we had to have’.

Treasurer Swan stood here today and he said, ‘This is the highest inflation we’ve had’—four per cent I think we are talking about—‘for 16 years.’ You bet. What happened 16 years ago? We were coming off the back of the worst recession that we had had, engineered by Paul Keating. And what did we have? What was the result of that? It was one million people unemployed. When you have one million people unemployed, of course inflation will come down. And that is the blunt tool that this government is using. It can talk about the Reserve Bank and it can talk about its planned cuts in expenditure from the budget, but everybody knows that, because of the strength of this economy—the one that it has inherited—there will be in excess of 1.5 per cent of GDP in the surplus without it doing anything at all. But the Australian people have to know: the government is the enemy of full employment. It is the enemy of full employment because it is handing back the monopoly power to the trade unions to push for wage increases. And that has begun already—you hear the voice of the head of the CFMEU; you see the strikes that are starting already. So when we see a bill like this being implemented in legislation today, which is bringing in a coalition policy that was designed to make sure that individuals who are older are able to participate in the growth of the economy, we see this measure as a ‘me too’ bill. What we are really seeing are the hardships those people are going to suffer because of the policies that this government is going to implement. Gone are the restraints, full-on will be the pressure.

The opposition will be supporting this bill. We are pleased to see a policy that we promised being implemented, even if we are unable to do it ourselves—but we are able to support it. We are pleased to see the $58 increase to recognise the importance of the internet—that is per year, I might add. We are disappointed that we have seen no progress talked about at all on the question of travel concession cards, and we are very disappointed to see that we seem to have a government that is hell-bent on dismantling the economy, which was in a strong condition when it inherited it. This will be to the disadvantage of ordinary individual Australians but will be to the huge benefit of the collectivist union movement.

See this speech in context